Hollywood legend Michael Ovitz discovered a cousin through buying his art

New York Post

15-05-2025

Legendary Hollywood power player Michael Ovitz, 78, has donated a stunning sculpture by Joel Shapiro to MOMA — and revealed the surprising link he has to the renowned artist
Ovitz and his fiancée Tamara Mellon, 57, have recently gifted a nearly 12-foot tall, multi-colored sculpture by Shapiro called ARK to the museum.
The dealmaker has been close to Shapiro, 83, ever since discovering they were cousins back in the '80s.
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7 Michael Ovitz and his fiancée Tamara Mellon have donated a nearly 12-foot sculpture by his cousin Joel Shapiro to MOMA.
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7 ARK, by Joel Shapiro, debuted last year at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea. It will now go to MOMA.
Courtesy of Michael Ovitz
In an astonishing story, Ovitz only made the connection after buying his first Shapiro piece at the Paula Cooper gallery in NYC in 1982, telling The Post, 'I was so excited, it was hard to get his work even then.
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'I went home to LA and my mom asked what I did in New York, I told her 'I bought a piece of sculpture by a young guy called Joel Shapiro' — she didn't skip a beat and said 'oh yeah he's your cousin' … I had no idea.'
When Ovitz asked why he had never met Shapiro before, his mother replied, 'You never asked!'
7 Shapiro is married to fellow artist Ellen Phelan.
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He then got Shapiro's phone number by calling up the Cooper gallery and telling an employee, 'I think I'm related to Joel Shapiro.
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'He said, 'it's funny, he told me once he had a cousin in the movie business', and I said 'yeah that's me,' ' reminisced Ovitz.
When he finally reached Shapiro, he told him, 'I'm told you're my cousin.'
'Yes, I think that's true.' the artist replied.
Ovitz was more dramatic. 'I said 'Joel, I hate you, I'm never talking to you again',' he recalled, 'You're my cousin and I just paid retail for a piece of your art.'. Since that day we've talked five times a week for the past 40 years.'
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7 Ovitz — seen with Mellon at a MOMA benefit hosted by Chanel in October 2024 — told The Post how he discovered that Shapiro was his cousin quite by chance in the 80s.
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Ovitz co-founded Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in 1975 and went on to become one of the quintessential power agents of the 1980s, cunningly negotiating big deals for a star-packed roster of clients that included Meryl Streep, Sean Connery, David Letterman and Steven Seagal. He left CAA in 1995 to become president of the Walt Disney Company but left the following year — with a severance packaged valued at $140 million — after butting heads with CEO Michael Eisner.
He's also known for his extensive art collection and philanthropy, and he's such a fan of his cousin's work that when he built a CAA headquarters in Beverly Hills in 1989, he commissioned only two artists to make pieces for the lobby — Roy Lichtenstein and Shapiro.
Shapiro debuted ARK last year at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, as part of his his show, 'Out of the Blue.' It was his first solo show at Pace in a decade.
'It's the biggest wood construction I've ever made, but I think it's not monumental, it's within human experience,' he told Forward at the time.
7 MOMA curator Ann Temkin said of Shaprio's work, 'This is a major late work, both in its scale of the imagination and its literal scale.'
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Ann Temkin, the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MOMA, said she has the perfect place for ARK.
'When Shapiro's work was shown at the Pace Gallery last autumn, the fantastic response that it had from everybody who has been following Joel's work for decades was really so enthusiastic,' Temkin told The Post.
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'Here is someone producing something as strong and surprising as ever after more than a century of making sculpture.
7 Shapiro and Phelan have been married for 35 years.
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'It was really joyful when this work was shown and everyone agreed it was a real milestone in his work, we at MOMA were delighted when Michael Ovitz, one of our trustees, told us he would like it to come to us.'
MOMA already has plenty of Shapiro's work on display, including drawings and sculptures. Temkin is thrilled to have a more recent work from him.
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'One of the real distinctions of the MOMA collection is that we really try to show artists' careers from beginning to end,' she said. 'This is a major late work, both in its scale of the imagination and its literal scale.'
They plan to place ARK in one of the galleries that has natural light and is adjacent to the sculptural garden.
7 Shapiro's 'Untitled' sculpture is seen on Chicago's lakefront in 2017.
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'I think that is an ideal situation,' she added.
Shapiro has no plans to stop making art anytime soon.
'I'm still improving,' he told Forward last year. 'Working keeps me going. As long as I don't get Alzheimer's, I've got plenty of work left in me. The joining together, the arranging, the language of sculpture, how it transcends cultures. All that still thrills me every day. What I am still aiming for is work you cannot refute.'